The classroom of Mrs. Langlois

I wanted to send out a quick Happy Holidays Blog. I hope all the families have an amazing time together and get rested for the new year. Yesterday our gallery walk of the students displays were a hit. It was nice to see so many families come and check out our work. For those families that did not make it here I have posted some pictures of how they all turned out.

One more day until holidays. Student's energy is ramping up with excitement! We have been busy in class to help keep students engaged. Our Arena projects are done! Students were completing finishing touches this afternoon. Last minute details were added to models, reports reviewed for spelling and mechanics and some groups were finishing up stakeholder bar graphs. Tomorrow they will be on display for the school to see and for parents to see. I will post photos as well. Please come and join us from 1:45 - 2:30 to view the projects in the iLab. If you want to stay after for carolling, we would love to hear more voices. In Math we are continuing to work on addition and subtraction strategies. I will try to post the strategies soon . . . my time has gotten away from me. In the new year we will continue to focus on these as well as introduce multiplication, perimeter and area. Yesterday we had a really good time at the Glenbow Museum. Between the two programs, we were able to see ...

It's Friday! Today was a very busy day . . . in fact the time got away from us as a class. We were so focused on what we were doing that we forgot to head down to the grade 4 celebration of learning. We have since sent a letter of apology to the students in grade 4 and have offered to have some share with us on Monday (if they are still interested). SORRY GRADE 4'S! What we were busy doing today was celebrating Ms. McCurdys last day with us. Along with Miss. Bowers (the other grade 3 student teacher) they created a building challenge for the students using the elastics from Beakerhead. We combined all three class together, randomly put kids together in groups of three and watched them create some amazing creations using only popsicle sticks, elastics, plastic spoons and pompoms. They were to create a launcher that launched a pompom the furthest. Students had time to plan, then create and then test their designs. Many tried to incorporate strong shapes into their designs. See ...

Its that time of year when things are busy and I forget my promises . . . my apologies for not keeping up with my promise of blog 3 times a week :( Students are continuing to work hard on their arena projects, specifically the report. Ms. McCurdy has been teaching students topic sentences and organization of writing. Students have written rough copies on paper and are beginning to transfer them to the computer. Typing can be a long process but students are beginning to learn short cuts! Some have learned the short cut of double clicking to correct spelling, and some are experimenting with voice to text. Its interesting watching eye light up as new technologies are shared among peers and students think they are "beating the system". If you have a chance, have your child open up their document and share it with you. They can do this at home by logging onto google drive with their student email and use their 8 character password. The email should be their first name last initi...

Our classroom has been very busy this past week. My apologies for not writing more on our blog. To get you up to date here are some highlights happening in our room: Math - Ms. McCurdy continues to focus on addition strategies. We are specifically looking at addition within problems. For example, one of the questions students had the choice to solve was ?4 + ??= 1??. Student had to use addition strategies to solve for the unknown numbers (?'s). These types of questions allow for multiple entry points. Students who are comfortable with regrouping can challenge themselves with using higher numbers, where as other students still trying to figure out the most effective strategy can work with simpler numbers. You can make it more challenging by putting more set numbers into the question. For example 1?5 + ?2? = 6?3. The more numbers that are placed in, the fewer choices students have making the work a bit harder and a little more complex. Science - Students have began to build their...